Book Review: Wendy Turgeon's "Philosophical Adventures with Fairy Tales: new ways to explore familiar tales with kids of all ages"

Abstract

Introduction: As I began reading Wendy Turgeon's fascinating book, I found myself in the middle of a long-ago memory about a training course for teaching Junior Great Books. A group of teachers reads silently, Jack and the Beanstalk. We generated some questions within the rubric of the Great Book training approach, which is exploring possible meanings of the story, or what was the author's intended meaning for this specific part of the story. The question that we chose to answer was: Why did Jack climb the beanstalk the third time? As the trainer indicated, the discussion will end when we have exhausted all of the possible supportable meaning of our question. In our case, this was about 1 hour.